Online store

What it means

An online store is a sales channel where the order, the payment and the document all arise without a personal meeting. In accounting that means a high count of small documents that have to be processed automatically - retyping stops working at the first few hundred orders a month.

For tax, who you sell to and where decides everything. Selling to a business, to a domestic consumer, to a consumer in another EU state and exporting outside the Union are four regimes with different places of supply.

An online store does not need its own warehouse. With dropshipping the goods go to the customer straight from the supplier and never physically pass through the company, yet the store is still the seller: it issues the customer’s document, it handles complaints, and where the goods ship from determines the place of supply.

How it works in practice

On sales to EU consumers, once the Union threshold is crossed the customer’s country VAT applies; administratively OSS handles it in one return instead of registering everywhere. The rate follows the country of delivery, not the shop’s seat.

Operationally the payment gateway, the carrier and the ledger are joined through an API so orders, gateway fees and cash on delivery reconcile themselves. Collection in person paid by cash or card falls under eKasa.

A store holding stock needs stock records that agree with the books. At year end we compare the quantities in the shop system with a physical count, and differences - broken goods, lost parcels, samples sent to influencers - are booked according to their cause, not in one lump entry.

What to watch out for

Gateway and carrier fees are what gets underestimated - in the books they are costs in their own right, not a discount off revenue, and leaving them out makes margin look better than it is. The second item is returns, which need a credit note, not a deleted invoice.

The distance selling threshold is counted across all EU states together, not per country, and it is watched during the year. A store that crosses it in autumn and keeps charging Slovak VAT owes tax to the customers’ states at their rates, and the documents already issued then have to be corrected after the fact.